Stoyan Stefanov has a new post to his blog looking at bringing something to PHP that Javascript developers have always had - object literals. These literals allow you to assign object properties at definition time instead of the usual PHP method of adding them either in the class definition or after the object exists.

Stoyan starts with an example of the object literals on Javascript and shows how it's (sort of) possible to replicate that wit type casting an array to an object in PHP. The tricky part comes in when you try to recreate the method handling JS gives in objects. Closures in PHP 5.3 comes close, but there's a few things he points out that just won't work the same way.

You can simulate some of this with __call method handling in a base "JSObject" class. For more details on his work bringing Javascript over to the world of PHP, check out his presentation from this year's ConFoo conference.